April 15: Emancipation Day
This year's ironic link between fed tax and slavery
by Pete Hendrickson
 As we wind up 2011's "tax season" we are treated to a multi-faceted irony. This year's "tax-day" has been postponed from the statutory April 15 to April 18 because a holiday observed in the District of Columbia, called "Emancipation Day," memorializes an event relating to the ending of race-based slavery, fell on a Saturday this year. In order to ensure that it can be taken as a day off work, the holiday is observed on the preceding Friday, and that means "tax day" has to move. This produces an irony that is rich for at least three reasons:
For one thing, what is memorialized by "Emancipation Day" was not really an outright emancipation. Instead, the event celebrated was the passage of the "Compensated Emancipation Act" (CEA), under which tax funds were used to buy slaves from their "owners," and only in DC. However unquestionably virtuous in its freeing of some 3,100 people from horrendous victimization, the fact is that the CEA was a cynical political ploy.
Lincoln, who didn't care a fig about the existing slavery, and had both campaigned on a promise to support the preservation of slavery in the South, and had lobbied throughout his political career for the deportation of all blacks from America to Africa, was not prosecuting a war of conquest against the breakaway Southern states in order to end "the peculiar institution." His interest was in retaining those states as a source of revenue for the benefit of the industrialized North under the tariff structure then in place. However, Lincoln recognized that the cause of looting the South for the sake of a bunch of rich industrialists didn't inspire too many young Northern men to risk getting their legs blown off.
Casting his war as being prosecuted for the high purpose of abolishing slavery WAS inspirational. But it was awkward for Lincoln to make that pitch in order to raise troops while slavery continued undisturbed in the very seat of the federal government. Hence the ironic CEA--a buy-off financed by taxes (rather than what it should have been: a simple declaration that all slaves in the district -- or the entire North, for that matter--were henceforth free, and the former "owners" be damned). The act freed one group of privately-held slaves in order to re-capture, at bayonet-point, a different group of people for continued exploitation by a different group of private interests through the mechanism of the federal government.
Second, it was under the same Lincoln that the "income" tax was initiated, and it is a virtual certainty that much of the buy-off under the CEA was financed thereby. That tax, while benign and, in fact, good and virtuous when properly understood and applied, came to be mis-understood and mis-applied, and to operate as a form of almost universal enslavement for generations until its actual limitations were re-discovered just eight years ago and laid out in ''Cracking the Code- The Fascinating Truth About Taxation In America" (CtC). Adding to the irony, even though the truth about that tax has now been revealed, emancipation from its misapplication is being strenuously resisted by the federal and state governments...
Third, it is by virtue of the government influence and control exercised over education in America--an influence and control the exercise of which is financed by the funds extracted from the citizenry under the misapplication of the "income" tax--that these facts are generally unknown by the American public. Thus, again, the incidence of this celebration on the statutory "income" tax deadline is a sublime irony.
Still, the irony, while broad, is paper-thin, for emancipation from the latter-day slavery of the mis-applied "income" tax IS going on, making for perhaps a fourth irony in the delay of "tax day." Because of that delay, occasioned by workers in the seat of the federal government having a tax-paid holiday, the self-emancipation that will be claimed by ten of thousands of American students of the information in CtC 2011 (maybe hundreds of thousands, this year) will be bumped to the week following the celebration of the officially-labeled "Emancipation Day." (By the way, if you're not one of those reclaiming your liberty, visit losthorizons.com.)
Anyway, as we wind up this "tax season," it's important that we remember not only what the law is regarding federal taxing authority and its limits, but also WHY the law is what it is. We must never forget that the founders organized our system of government to make each of us part of the "invisible hand" (IH) by which all of society benefits through each individual looking out for his or her own interests in our civic character, as well as our economic character.
The economic application of the IH principle takes advantage of the unique knowledge possessed by each person as to his or her own special skills, talents, and interests, and the incentive to maximize--for one's own benefit--the efficiencies and returns of every effort and investment. Each person being free to peacefully apply this knowledge and purpose organically ensures that overall quality and productivity are high and that resources are wisely allocated, all of which are to the benefit of everyone in the country.
This freedom-oriented IH dynamic is in sharp contrast to any kind of centrally-controlled, dictated and regulated structure, in which choices become skewed by the interests of the controllers (at the expense of the controlled); efficiencies in resource-allocation are hobbled by the controller's limited knowledge of vast amounts of diverse and often highly-specialized information (if not entirely disregarded in service to some ideological or purely self-serving agenda of those making everyone's decisions); and incentives for high quality and productivity are anemic....
Exercising our rights and responsibilities as good citizens-- in the manner provided for, and, indeed, relied upon by the founders-- is what CtC is really all about. Those who want to rule don't want you to know about your power in this regard, and don't want you to exercise your power. THEY want to be the ones deciding how much of YOUR substance will be burned to drive the ship to THEIR preferred destination.
They want you to believe that it would be improper for you to look out for your own interests (including your interest in preserving and upholding the rule of law); that somehow it is socially irresponsible for you to NOT subordinate your preferences and purposes to those they would assign to you. Balderdash!
The fact is, it is irresponsible for you to NOT elevate your preferences to primacy, and to view what are declared to be "public interests" as simply the interests of competitors. This is all "public interests" really are, whether sometimes congruent with your own interests or not. Either way, it is by you looking out for yourself, and acting to enforce the Constitutional provisions designed to help you do so, that America's needs are best served.
So exercise your civic power, and meet your civic responsibilities, as the founders intended. Be a proud part of the "invisible hand" and exercise your lawful control over the engine that's driving "full speed ahead" for the rocks.
Get CtC for free at http://losthorizons.com/CtCforFree.pdf
Learn about the seven-year-and-counting desperate effort to keep you from learning the liberating truth about the "income" tax at http://losthorizons.com/ADocumentedCtCSuppressionHistory.pdf
Learn the truth about the tax and so much more at losthorizons.com
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2011 April 18
Copyright Pete Hendrickson via The Coffee Coaster™
Educated Tax | Income Tax | Emancipation | Pete Hendrickson | CtC |
